Joanna MacGregor

Biography

MacGregor grew up in North London, and was educated at home, with her brother and sister, by her parents; she won a free place to South Hampstead High School at the age of 11. Her mother is a piano teacher and taught her as a little girl, and her father worked in the printing trade. Joanna began studying with Christopher Elton at the age of seventeen, and read music at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge) (1978–81) where she was taught composition by Hugh Wood. After Cambridge, she pursued postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music. She became Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music in 2011.

Unusually, in the early years of her performing career, Joanna MacGregor was a prolific composer for the theatre (including work for Cheek by Jowl, and Oxford Stage Company's production of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle and the Edinburgh Festival). She was one of the first artists to be selected for the Young Concert Artists Trust in 1985, and has since performed in over seventy countries, appearing as a solo artist with many of the world's leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Berlin Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia, Melbourne Symphony and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, Hong Kong Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Salzburg Camerata. The many eminent conductors with whom she has worked include Pierre Boulez, Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Colin Davis, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Valery Gergiev, and she has appeared in many of the world's greatest venues, including the Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre and the Barbican in London, Sydney Opera House, New York’s Lincoln Center, Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Repertoire

Joanna MacGregor is particularly known for her Bach interpretations and recordings, and was invited by Sir John Eliot Gardiner to perform the Goldberg Variations at the Royal Albert Hall in April 2013. She is also currently performing the complete Mozart concertos and Beethoven sonatas, and performed the complete Chopin Mazurkas to widespread acclaim in 2010. Alongside core piano repertoire, she has premiered many landmark compositions - including piano concertos by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Django Bates, Hugh Wood, John Adams (composer), Alasdair Nicolson, Jonathan Harvey and James MacMillan - and has commissioned over 100 new works.

Conducting, curating and collaboration

Joanna MacGregor made her conducting debut in 2002 and regularly directs her own orchestral projects, including an all-Mozart programme with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Bach with the Hallé. She enjoys a close artistic partnership as conductor and performer with the Britten Sinfonia, in programmes ranging from classical music to collaborations with jazz and world musicians, including Andy Sheppard, Seb Rochford, Nitin Sawhney and Arve Henriksen. In 2009 she opened the London Jazz Festival with the Britten Sinfonia and Arabic singer and oud virtuoso Dhafer Youssef, hailed by The Times as 'the future of music'. Their fifteen-year orchestral partnership has continued with tours in Europe and Latin America.

She created (with composer Alasdair Nicolson) the Platform Festival of contemporary and improvised music, which ran at the ICA in London from 1991-3; a series of music events, SoundCircus, ranging from Elvis Costello and Courtney Pine to Ensemble Moderne and Steve Reich, at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (1997–99); a celebration of British contemporary music (featuring Tom Ades) for the New York Philharmonic (1999); and Cross Border with Jin Xing's Contemporary Dance Theatre of Shanghai, combining Chinese traditional music with computer technology and film. Cross Border toured China in 2003.

From 2006-12 Joanna MacGregor was the Artistic Director of the Bath International Music Festival, where alongside many classical artists, ensembles and orchestras, she commissioned Brian Eno, the writer and cultural historian Marina Warner, jazz and electronica artists, folk musician Kathryn Tickell, and poets Michael Rosen and Roger McGough. She instigated Party in the City, a massive, free event which takes over the whole city of Bath on the first Friday of the Festival; she also created the annual installation On the Edge of Life, bringing together visual artists, scientists, writers and musicians examining issues as diverse as premature birth, homelessness and child human rights.

In 2010 she curated the multi-arts festival Deloitte Ignite for the Royal Opera House, which included performances from the Royal Ballet and Phoenix Dance Theatre, Ex Cathedra, the aerialist Ilona Jäntti, Jah Wobble, Talvin Singh, and Tibetan Monks from Tashi Lumpo Monastery, as well as major installations from the Royal College of Art and the sculptural artist Alice Anderson.

Books and music

In 1990 the BBC broadcast Joanna MacGregor’s radio play, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, about the life of Erik Satie, with Jim Broadbent. It was nominated for the Prix Italia.

Her series of colourful piano teaching books for children, Piano World, was published in May 2001 by Faber Music. The books feature storytelling, cartoons, games and include companion CDs, with music ranging from classical and jazz to gospel and hip hop. Her short piano piece, Lowside Blues, was chosen for the Associated Board Grade 7 piano exams, and became very popular with young pianists worldwide.

Recent compositions have included Lute Songs (2008) (based on the music of Dowland), and Lost Highway (2010), for piano and orchestra. In 2012 she revived and re-worked, with director Richard Williams, a popular adaption of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, for chamber ensemble and seven opera singers. It has toured extensively, and was chosen as her ‘swansong’ at Bath International Music Festival.

Awards, honours, broadcasts

Between 1997 and 2000, Joanna MacGregor was Professor of Music at Gresham College, London, giving free public lectures. She was made Professor of Performance at Liverpool Hope University in 2007, and has received honorary Fellowships from the Royal Academy of Music, Trinity College of Music, and Murray Edwards, Cambridge (New Hall). She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from the Open University, the University of Bath and Bath Spa University. MacGregor was appointed as Member of the Arts Council England in 1998 alongside Anish Kapoor, Brian McMaster, Anthony Gormley and Andrew Motion, leaving in 2004.

In 2003, she was recognised for her innovation with a Royal Philharmonic Society award for imaginative programming and tireless work in opening up music to new audiences. Other awards include European Encouragement Prize for Music 1995, NFMS Sir Charles Grove Award 1998, and South Bank Show Award for Classical Music 2000.

MacGregor was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to music.

Joanna MacGregor broadcasts regularly on television and radio; in 2012 she was the soloist in three BBC Proms, and her performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations was broadcast live from the Albert Hall in 2013. She was the subject of an edition of The South Bank Show in December 2001 and presented her own series Strings, Bows, and Bellows for BBC television. She also filmed Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for BBC television, as well as appearing in the Great Composers Series.

Recordings and SoundCircus label

Between 1990 and 1995 Joanna MacGregor made more than 15 solo recordings with Collins Classics, ranging from Bach and Scarlatti to music by Ravel, Debussy, Ives, Bartók and Messiaen, as well as contemporary music.

In 1998, she launched her own record label SoundCircus in association with Unknown Public. The label combines new recordings with re-releases of older recordings which MacGregor was able to reclaim after Collins Classics ceased trading. She now owns the copyright to all of her recorded material, and the label is now in partnership with Warner Classical and Jazz.

Discography

See also reissues on SoundCircus/Warner Classics and Jazz

Concerto repertoire: piano and orchestra

Piano and Orchestra